Bookworm Club

While Packrat and I aren't big on the hot-housing of our children and forcing them to read and write before they are ready, we're very big on them liking books and enjoying books. Our battle is half won because Jordan loves books. Loves books to the point that she immerses herself in them and is oblivious to her teacher trying to get her to do other activities. She will even pick up the books we are reading, Packrat's travel guides and my novels or my Time Magazine. Often she attempts to weave a story through the pictures she sees. If she doesn't see any, as is the case when she picks up my novels, she pretends to read and cooks up a story all by herself.

Evan's love for books is slightly different. He loves the story we tell him and revels in it being the same, word for word. He loves the familiarity of the stories and will fill in the blanks for us. His latest thing with his favourite stories, since he already knows the story back to front is to have us read it with the punctuation marks. This tickles him to no end. To us, it disturbs the flow of the story but he loves it. His favourite punctuation marks are the commas and the inverted commas.

So here are their 10 favourite books. I will list them in no particular order because I can't really rank them save for one or two of them. There are also a couple of Chinese books that they like, but I can't find the cover art for them so I'm leaving them out for now.

1. Papa, Please Get the Moon for Me by Eric Carle.
























The twins love the moon and its various phases. They first learnt the crescent moon, I suspect during the National Day season. And having learnt the word circle in Chinese, the twins, particularly Evan have been very keen to point out anything that is 圆 形. So, this book was great because it was about a little child who was fascinated with the moon and wants Papa to get the moon. The long ladder that Papa uses that spans two pages is quite a thing as well as is the long climb to the moon. Of course, Packrat and I are taken by the fact that Papa isn't scared of heights and hope Papa doesn't look down just as he is high up enough to touch the moon.

2. All Safe On Board- Mig Holder

A variation of Noah's Ark with lots of delightful animals from the dormouse to the fennel fox. Evan's favourite part is when the naughty monkey pulls the camel's tail. In anger, the camel spits, as camels tend to do, and the elephant panics thinking that the rains are upon them. Jordan's favourite part of the book is the last page where the ark is all closed up, in the rain and if you unfold the pages, it reveals ALL the animals safe in the ark. There, she will spin yarns about what the animals are doing.














3. Kitten's First Full Moon- Kevin Henkes

Amazing illustrations in monochrome about a tiny kitten who thinks the full moon (once again a moon!) is a big bowl of milk and her attempts to try and get it. It involves her wriggling her bum and pouncing and falling on her face. She also ends up in the pond because she thinks the moon's reflection in the pond is the same bowl of milk. The twins love acting up the physical bits of description where Kitten 'stretches her neck', 'closes her eyes' and 'licks' or when she 'bumps her nose' and 'pinches her tail'. Of course, I tried to be imaginative and told Evan that the bug that eventually landed on Kitten's tongue when she licked was actually a firefly. And ever since, I've had to remember that it was a firefly or get sternly berated by my son.













4. Miss Polly had a Dolly

Technically not a book but a nursery rhyme. A book from their younger, younger days that they recently re-discovered because they must have done it in school. And in true fashion of finding new things to learn from the most unlikely of places, they have learnt about doctors and stethoscopes. They impressed our family physician when they walked into the consultation room and asked her to listen to their hearts with her stethoscope.




















5. Five Little Monkeys Jumping on the Bed- Eileen Christelow

I have 2 Five Little Monkeys books. The twins love this one because they often use our bed as their trampoline. The book is repetitive as all the monkeys progressively fall off the bed and bump their heads. This isn't a 'wind down' book. The twins get very hyped on it, jumping on the bed, pretending to be the monkeys, bellowing as the doctor in the book does- "No more monkeys jumping on the bed!". Of course, they don't stop the jumping even when they can tell us that the monkeys' heads hurt from the bumping.




















6. Five Little Monkeys Bake a Birthday Cake- Eileen Christelow

Yet another of the 5 Little Monkeys series. Unlike the previous one, this one has more of a story and isn't repetitive. The twins like birthday cakes because of the candles they get to blow out. They also generally like the mess that is created when cakes are baked. So when the monkeys made a mess, they clapped their hands in glee. They shushed each other loudly when the monkeys thought they had woken up their Mama whom they were baking the cake for.




















7. Horton Hears a Who- Dr Seuss

Jordan's favourite soft toy is an elephant so she has great affinity for elephants. We've discovered the twins love Dr Seuss because of the rhyming and the bright colours and made up words. Evan enjoys the fact that he can frown at the vultures (he doesn't like vultures) and both of them love the Mayor's little boy Jo-Jo.
























8. The Lorax- Dr Seuss

Yet another story with great rhyme and silly words. The twins love the Barbaloots in the Barbaloot suits and the fact that they look like teddy bears. They've learnt that L is for Lorax and that the Barbaloots had to run away because there were no more Truffala trees to play under. It's got a great environmental message about the terrible consequences of industrialization and deforestation.
























9. The Little Engine That Could- Watty Piper

Their version of this book is larger than they are. It's a big book, I suspect for story time in schools. The twins love the list of toys and dolls and the food that the Little Engine is bringing to the boys and girls. They don't like the black train that doesn't help and first learnt how to express emotion with this book. They learnt how to say that the Little Engine was 'sad' and that the Black train was an 'angry' train. They also learnt to use the word 'happy' when the Little Engine made it over the hill. They loved chanting "I think I can, I think I can" and we've used this to encourage them to do things that they think is too difficult for them.






















10. The Gruffalo- Julia Donaldson

























Right now, the twins' favourite of favourites. The rhyme is great, the tension and mood created through the story is great. The description of the Gruffalo which is slowly revealed through the story enthralled the twins. Every evening, they would try to look for the 'purple prickles all over his back" on our backs and the 'poisonous wart at the end of his nose"on our noses. They love the sometimes alliterative animal-food combinations- ' scrambled snake', ' owl ice-cream' and 'roasted fox'. Evan, being fascinated by tunnels was thrilled to learn that the fox, in order to get into his 'underground house' needed to go through a tunnel. The colourful scenes of the "deep dark woods" with butterflies, toadstools, twigs on the ground and bluebell flowers gave the twins a whole lot of stuff to pick out and discover every time we read the book.

I'm in the midst of finding other books that will hold their attention. I have discovered that there is a sequel to the Gruffalo called The Gruffalo's Child where the kid Gruffalo goes looking for the mouse that is the protaganist in the first story. They also have a whole library of hand-me-down Thomas the Tank Engine books and Bob the Builder books that they flip through every day but these ten seem to be their perennial favourites.

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